Friday, April 13, 2018

Why Yulia Skripal, Released From Hospital, Is Being Held in UK Police Custody

Having reworked and extended my earlier post Novichok: Russia's Antidote to Seafood Poisoning I am more inclined than before to believe it possible that the Skripals were treated with Novichok as an antidote to botulinum toxin, it being the case that the one nerve agent, because of a difference in mode of action, could be an effective antidote to the other nerve agent, as explained in my earlier post.

To be credible, the theory must presume orchestration of the entire sequence of events. Thus, the botulinum toxin must have been deliberately administered as a sub-lethal dose in the seafood lunch that the Skripals consumed several hours before they were taken ill. (Although botulinum toxin can occur in seafood, it does not occur in fresh seafood — as opposed to canned food, since Clostridium botulinum only produces the toxin under anoxic conditions.)

But if the affair was orchestrated, the Skripals were surely participants rather than victims in the operation, a plausible assumption since Sergei Skripal is known to have worked for MI6 and may have resumed his service to them on release from Russian gaol.

So how was it worked?

I suggest that there was a small dose of botulinum toxin added to their seafood lunch, which caused illness several hours later, but not the vomiting and convulsions as reported by the doctor who attended on them and asked that her name not be released to the public. Rather the illness would have been manifest as the paralysis characteristic of botulism. If that assumption is correct, then we must assume that the attending, unidentified doctor who described the Skripals' symptons as those of poisoning by a nerve agent of the Novichok type (i.e., a convulsant), is an agent of MI6 and that she deliberately misled the media.

Once received at the Salisbury Trust Hospital, experts in nerve agent poisoning at the nearby British Chemical and Biological Weapons research establishment would likely have been consulted, which would have created the opportunity for them to supply the hospital with British-made Novichok (a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union) as an antidote to botulinum toxin, the mechanism whereby one nerve agent counteracts another being described in my previous post. The identity of this antidote may well not have been disclosed to the Hospital staff.

After that, the Skripals may have been kept in a more or less comotose state with, perhaps repeated small doses of botulinum toxin, which would have necessitated continual infusions of Novichok to prevent paralysis and death by asphyxiation. That would explain why, weeks after the initial poisoning, blood samples of the "victims" still contained detectable quantities of Novichok, as established by independent testing of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It would also explain why Yulia Skripal, though released from hospital, is in UK police custody.

The objective now, if the above scenario is a more or less accurate representation of actual events, must be to keep the Skripals out of the hands of the Russian state, where they could be forced to disclose their complicity in a psyop. perpetrated to undermine the credibility and moral standing of the Russian government. That would explain the offer by the CIA to give the Skripals new identities.